IN October 1863, the Darlington and Stockton Times reported: "The quiet little town of Wolsingham is now in a fair way of becoming of much more importance.

"Workmen have been for some time engaged in building a new hall and manager's house, laying down a railway junction and putting in foundations for 48 pudding furnaces and rolling mills."

That heralded the start of steel-making in Wolsingham, which has carried on until today.

But it was as far back as 1427 that iron ore was first transported in Weardale, where it was smelted on wood-burning furnaces at the Bishop of Durham's forge at Bedburn. The bishop was reported to have made a modest profit.

It was not until Charles Attwood, the pioneer of the iron and steel industry in Weardale, opened a blast furnace at Stanhope in 1845, with the help of London bankers Barings, that the industry really took off.

Attwood, who opened a network of railway lines in the dale, demonstrated the excellent malleable qualities of Weardale steel to the world.

From 1869 to 1916, the amount of ironstone produced in Weardale reached a staggering - 1,365,307 tons - mainly due to the foresight and efforts of Attwood.

Attwood, who was also described as a shrewd politician and man of science, died at the ripe old age of 85 at his beautiful home, Holywood Hall, Wolsingham, in 1875.

His steel and iron empire then passed to his wife's family, who traded under the name of John Rogerson and Co until 1930. But working conditions in those days were primitive.

Archive material kept by Weardale Steel records show how one Mr Metcalfe started a seven-year apprenticeship as a patternmaker for a wage of four shillings for a six-day week.

Out of that, one penny was contributed to the Newcastle Infirmary and another penny to the Mechanics Institute in Wolsingham.

The works hooter sounded at 5.30am every day and Mr Metcalfe can recall seeing one old man crawling on his hands and knees along the "low bridge" determined to get to work. There were no trade unions in those days.

In 1930, the business was bought out by the Sunderland shipbuilding and engineering families of Marr and Thompson and it prospered, becoming the industrial heart of Weardale in the late 1950s and early 1960s, when it employed more than 600 workers.

It was then bought out by the state-run British Shipbuilders however, which, after several years of unsuccessfully trying to balance the books, prepared to deliver the knock-out punch in 1983. Closure, as it had happened at the nearby Consett steelworks, loomed sharply on the horizon.

But in stepped the far-sighted Dorset-based Langham group of industries, providing the spur to a jaded workforce by bringing in a fresh management team with fresh ideas.

Mainly through securing orders for giant rudder horns from European shipbuilders and the American Navy, the new bosses at Weardale Steel turned a virtual stagnant turnover of £1m under British Shipbuilders into £10m worth of orders in 1996.

And a 126-strong workforce faced the future with confidence.

Today, that confidence has been evaporated in just over a month - since the Birmingham-based Eastwood Industries group took over at Wolsingham.

If Weardale Steel fails to carry on, then the William Cook (Blairs) foundry at Stanhope will stand alone as the last big employer in the "working dale." - a far cry from those heady days of steel-making inspired by Charles Attwood.